Good point. I appear to have gotten my systems confused. The OLD system rewards losing. The NEW system involves making the front a dangerous (but not undesirable!) place to be. If you have the tresorces to get in front, you should be able to take on the various people who want to knock you down. It is not a matter of making the bottom a nice place to be: it is a matter of making sure you have to THINK about using your tremendous resorces(sp?) so that you can stay on top, without blatantly obvious tactical mechanics. Your system would work, but mine is esier to justify in a real-life situation.

This was the MAIN reason I was pushing for more defensive type-abilities several pages back, along with a better map overlay. Look at it this way, in civ3, weak countries could often defend against incredibly powerful foes.. not indefinitely, but they still could and this was usually due to placement of the city and terrain bonus's. This would make it where you would have to throw quite a bit at an enemy in order to win.

Now in Space everything is just empty, that is where the problem comes in. Tough countries (or even weak ones) just fly through whereever and the only thing you have to worry about is soldiering (to make it easier), nothing else. Therefore the powerful become way way way more powerful, since there is no way to even put up any type of defense, period.

Not only that, but larger civ's research SOOOOO much faster, that battle becomes waaaaaay too lopsided way too quickly.

Both are serious gameplay issues that need to be addresses, imo. I often don't care that the biggest civ's are the most powerful, that is just how it is.... only thing is, there is absolutely ZERO way to try to counter it to 'hold out and make your last stand'.

The way I see it, there is a precise balence that you have to hit to make a perfect military system for this or any game. If defense is more powerful than offense, you get a nightmarish trench warfare sytem that most everyone will hate. If offense is more powerful than defense, you get a "rich get richer" problem like we have now. It's a matter of fuinding the balance between those two. However, everyone is focused on the military element, and as a "culture warrior"/research freak I find this rather annoying. Also, I think we should stop using the words "size" and  "power" interchangebly. A civ can retreat into a very tiny section of space and fortify itself by hyper-developintg what planets is does have, becomiong the most powerful (but isolationistic) player on the map and winning by tech or alliance victory even though it is not the physically largest. It may help the "rich get richer" paradox if the other three methods of victory was expanded, and military power was not the most important aspect.

Yep, but still -- there are some specific decisions to take;

1- I have to defeat the last opponent on Immense.

2- We're pretty much dead even on number of planets, *amount* of currently available ships.

3- I declare war.

4- I must "design" multiple ways to attack, invade, destroy and take over whatever is necessary from a series of different planets sparsely distributed in my zones of control.

5- Build, deploy and send everything on their way to conquest.

Thus, micro-managing of enemy's fleets eradication processing.

6- Pouf, they start dropping Spies.

7- Bang, all starbases & Trading routes are now under continual attacks.

Thus, do i keep up and recuperate? Micro-Managing too.

It's not the quantity, it's if some automation (Governors, RallyPoints) ***can*** be used effectively during any given situations ***without*** Micro-Managing beyond mind focusing attention to some details.

I would like to see the user ranks made a bit more accessible. As far as I know, only one person has made "diplomat" status.

If you have a few good planets full of research tiles and good relations with most of the races, you can get to the tech victory before the negative diplo factor causes everyone to go after you. It's not impossible, or a once-in-a-lifetime freak incident. As for an alliance victory, if you get a lot of little races on your side (or one or two big ones), it doesn't really matter how large YOU are. It is of course harder if you are small, but size is not the same as power. My examples may be a bit hyperbolic, but the underlying principle is vaild.

Wonder why the devs took out Sector Patrol... It is definately something I want to see revived. That, and multiple tech prereqs.

I never said it was difficult; I said the AI was stupid for allowing you to do it. No AI should stand idly by while you win the game, no matter how good relations you have with them. If the AI had half a brain, there'd be no way to pull it off.

Game features should not be designed around assuming that the AI will be brain-dead. Just another reason why GC2 would not make a good multiplayer game.

Whats about an HotSeat Mode?? Makes more fun playing with friend at one Computer

That is exactly what I am looking for as a quick fix for the rich-get-richer problem: an AI that does everything in its power to stop you when it looks like you are going to win.

Also, something simple that will increase the quality of the game tremendously: have the XML parser look at the first letter of the display name for imps and other things that create an on-screen message, and swap out "a" or "an" as the case requires. I am becoming very annoyed at the game saying "so and so has built a eyes of the univese..." It won't really affect much with regards to gameplay, but it will certainly make things an bit more immersive .

If they do multiplayer, they will have to find some way to redeaign the diplomacy ratings. The way it works now, two human players could decide to ally beforehand and do so as soon as the ntech was available, while the computer would still have to build up relations.

I find clicking on any column headers particularly useful to page through the Colony manager screen when there's more than 1 page, i can instantly detect almost anything by letters, building names, ships, values, etc.

I could use some sort of checkboxes in a supplemental column to the far right though that would allow me to rush-buy, say, all Battleships currently building... and, so on.

Or some form of auto-farming detection to loop out of stucked population levels; more like a PIs queue priority correction to focus on the actual needs. Moving up or down the individual planet listings or trust incode functions to properly insert the "instinctive" lack of such Farms or Morale.

So the player to reach a % of the total economic power (% of BC) in the galaxy wins. That would work better than reaching a specified limit anyways, since smaller maps would never be able to meet large specified BC amounts. As long as they make sure there is no way to reach the 75% amount very early (which could happen easily if other civ's all spent their cash in 1 turn). There would have to be some additional requirements to be met.

Again, only if they keep the dreaded Rush-Building in the game. I don't mind it, but it is was too cheap in GC2 to rush build things. Rush Building should be monumentally expensive (probably 2-3 times what it is now) to keep people (like myself) from rush building every galactic achievement from scratch (achievements should not be allowed to be rush-built anyways). From the 'sounds' of the Elemental Engine, I would say it is likely they may tone this down quite a bit, or perhaps even take it out, since it somewhat goes against some of the things that the new engine brings to the table.

A simple option in the game of AI war aggression or something could be stuck in there, of course there is an option like that under each specific civ anyways during game setup.